Strauss-Kahn finally resigned as the head of the IMF overnight after a string of fresh allegations about his sexual behaviour ("he behaved like a gorilla") emerged, none related to the allegations that he assaulted a chambermaid in the Sofitel Hotel, in mid-Manhattan, last weekend.

But official France, the "republican elite", has seen the affair in a very different light. The American justice system and social morals have been attacked. French media have been threatened with legal action for publishing photos of DSK in handcuffs (so unfair to the accused!) and at least one of his ex-wives insists he has "many faults but [violence] is not one of them".

Ok, if you say so. A worldly, Francophone friend says the explanation may be that DSK asked the Sofitel to provide him with sexual services – this was rich Manhattan, after all – and he mistook his alleged victim for the woman he thought he'd paid to see.

Either way, it all sounds a bit weird to me. A French poll says 57% of people think DSK has been set up. But laissez faire (is that the right phrase?) French attitudes towards the boundaries of private/public behaviour have long struck me as a bit weird.

The fact is that insiders knew their prospective president, a brilliant public figure whose loss may harm us all, had a problem in his attitude towards women.

Yet Jean Quatremer, the journalist who blogged about it in 2007 (as DSK headed towards the IMF) was abused as a "Torquemada of sexual politics" for mildly observing that DSK's behaviour ("too heavy-handed, he often verges on harassment") might land him in trouble in the US, where women do not put up with the "you'll have to sleep with me if you want an interview" attributed to DSK at home.

Jump on the Eurostar and in an hour or so you can find people, not so different from their French friends and neighbours in countless ways, taking a very shirty view of Clarke's round of combative interviews on his sentencing policy proposals yesterday.

The accusation that Clarke has "betrayed every woman in Britain" is nauseating coming from the bum and tit brigade.

But it's where we are this morning, and the Guardian's own editorial has it right. The "Clarke Must Go" lobby is an unholy alliance between the Labour party (in France, the lefties are on DSK's side) and the Tory tabloids, which have been gunning for the justice secretary as a cabinet liberal with as much zeal as they have been stalking Vince Cable, Chris Huhne and David Laws.

We're not doing that one today, merely noting in passing the power of selective indignation – or the lack of it on the other side of the Channel. But does the current potency of gender politics also create an atmosphere where selectivity thrives, whether it's sexual crime, women's share of university places or the dole queue? I think it may, and that we should be mindful of it.

But Clarke's real offence, to many, is his disputing the proposition that "rape is always rape". Circumstances matter, he insisted as he attributed much of the furore to "newspaper nonsense" (he probably meant yesterday's Mail, which got the sentencing row going) and said the tabloids love of "a bit of sexual excitement in the headlines".

But they do differentiate, they do. A man who knocks down another man in a brawl and sees the man fall on a pavement stone and smash his skull is sometimes charged with murder but convicted of manslaughter, sometimes even acquitted.

Well within recent memory, women who killed brutal, abusive husbands – especially with premeditation (you may need to plan to overcome a stronger person) – could be convicted of murder. In 1955, Ruth Ellis was hanged for shooting a real bastard, something which, even then, many people could see was wrong. It never happened again, it would not happen now – and quite right, too.

So there are distinctions to be made about all types of crime – the motive, nature, context and consequences to name but a few. Clumsy and 70 yearsold he may be, but has Clarke ever been accused of sexism by women colleagues, let alone of DSK-ism? I think not.

Acknowledging distinctions was all Clarke struck me as trying to do in the context – let's remember – of sentencing policy: do we really think it's good to pack our fetid prisons as much as we do, at great cost and doubtful benefit?

I realise that rape must be an unusually traumatic experience for most victims, uniquely horrible in its own way, as a few other categories of crime are too. Millions of women have suffered it in war. Not all such lives are shattered.

But it's also a very difficult case to prosecute in our kind of society for reasons I'm not going to address today. Not the right moment to further inflame heightened feelings, and we all know the arguments.

We'll leave that one to Fay Weldon or Germaine Greer. Doubtless they are typing away, fearlessly and furiously, as we speak.